WILLIAM HOGARTH 1697-1764

William Hogarth was born in 1632 in the heart of London, son of a young school teach­er from the north of England who came to London to make his fortune, wrote his text­books, found himself correcting for print­ers and married his landlord’s daughter.

Richard Hogarth taught, wrote, and to make ends meet opened a Latin-speaking coffee house. When William Hogarth was ten the coffee house failed and the family found itself living within the Rules of the Fleet Prison*, his father imprisoned for debt and his mother eking out a livelihood selling patent medicines.

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* Fleet Prison— prison for debtors; demolished in 1842.

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For five years the Hogarths were imprisoned — the years of Wil­liam’s adolescence that would have seen him either on his way to a university or an ap­prenticeship. When the family emerged his father was a broken man, and William was scarred. He never mentioned this period but he repeatedly introduced prisons, debtors and jailers, literally and metaphorically, into his paintings.

At the age of 17, Hogarth became an ap­prentice of a silver engraver. After the death of his father he did not complete his ap­prenticeship, but instead set up on his own as an engraver.

He engraved small shop cards, but he devot­ed every spare minute to book illustration, topical prints, and study at the newly founded Vanderbank Academy of Art*

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* Vanderbank Academy of Art — the art school run by the painter John Vanderbank (1694-1739) who regarded histo­ry painting the highest form of art.

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After four years from silver to copper engraving, he achieved some notice around London with a small satire “The Taste of the Town”. Soon his first major work, a series of 12 large plates based on Samuel Butler’s “Hudibras”*.

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* “Hudibras”— satiric poem by Samuel Butler (1612-1680), the most outstanding literary work of the Restoration antiutopian tendencies.

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The earliest surviving paintings by Hoga­rth are “The Beggar’s Opera”* and “Falstaff** Examining the Recruits” sketched directly from the stage. Hogarth made at least five paintings on the subjects of “The Beggar’s Opera”, progressing within little more than a year from a clumsy student of oils to a polished painter whose natural expression is through paint.

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* ”The Beggar’s Opera” — comic opera by John Gay (1685-1723).

**Falstaff — a character in Shakespeare's “Henry IV” and “Henry V" and “Merry Wives of Windsor”

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Dozens of “conversational pieces” — rela­tively small and cheap group portraits — demonstrated the fertility of Hogarth’s brush in the early 1730s. Yet he still felt constricted: they were only portraits, they represented too much work for too little money, and work that was not suited to the genius of the engraver of “Hudibras”.

The momentous step, however, was the launching of a subscription for engravings of the “Harlot’s Progress” paintings. Follow­ing the practice of other paintings who had allowed their major work to be engraved and sold by subscription, he added one novelty: he dispensed with a printseller managed the subscription himself, and kept all the prof­its; he also found soon enough that only he could adequately engrave his own paintings. The success of the venture was beyond his expectations. Nearly 2,000 sets were sub­scribed for a guinea* each, and their fame reached from the highest to the lowest.

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* guinea — English gold coin, notionally worth 21 shillings (1 pound 5 pence). It has not been minted since 1817, when it was superseded by the gold sovereign, but was used until 1971 in billing professional fees. Expensive items in shops were often priced in guineas.

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His response as painter was to paint another series — of eight this time — concerning the life of a young merchant’s son who uses his inheritance to set himself as a rake and squander his money, morals, freedom, sani­ty, and life. Other paintings followed by en­graving, or “modern moral subjects” as he called them (“comic history paintings” as his friend Henry Fielding* was to call them) fol­lowed “The Rake’s Progress” in rapid suc­cession: “A Midnight Modern Conversation”, “The Distressed Poet”, “The Four Times of the Day”, and “Strolling Actresses in a Bam”.

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* Fielding,Henry (1707-1754) — English novelist. His most fa­mous book was “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling” (1749).

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In the midst of all this activity Hogarth was diverted by another challenge. When he arrived on the scene foreign artists had domi­nated English portraiture since Van Dyck*.

Hogarth had inherited the English painters’ hostility to foreign artists who took all the good commissions from native artists. Now in 1734 Jacopo Amiconi a history painter from Venice was about to secure a commission to decorate the new wing of St Bartholomew Hospital*.

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* St Bartholomew Hospital — the oldest benevolent institution in London founded in the 12lh century.

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Hogarth went to the treasury and offered to paint gratis an Englishman’s ver­sion of sublime history. He painted the two huge panels. He also pursued other experi­ments at sublime history during the 1730s.

The second challenge from abroad in the late 1730s was J. B. Van Loo* who arrived from Paris and quickly monopolized the portrait market, driving some artists into bankrupt­cy.

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* Van Loo, Jean Baptiste (1684-1745) — portrait painter who moved to London in 1737 and had an immediate success.

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As responded by beginning to paint por­traits himself. One of the most famous works of this period was the portrait of his friend Thomas Coram*.

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* Coram, Thomas (1668-1751) — English philanthropist who established the Foundling Hospital for orphaned and aban­doned children in Holborn, London, 1741.

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He donated his finished por­trait, and in 1740s he organized his artist friends to donate more paintings establish­ing in the Foundling Hospital the first pub­lic museum of English art.

In the early 1740s while still painting por­traits, he began to plan a new “comic history” cycle, this time of high life “Marriage a la Mode”, also saw his self-portrait with his dog Trump, which he engraved as frontis­piece to the bound volumes of his engrav­ings he was now selling; and an auction of his paintings-for-engraving, without the in­terference of picture dealers. After that he suddenly abandoned painting for histories and turned to drawing, and a cruder, sim­pler style of engraving, addressing himself to a lower and larger audience. “Industry and Idleness”, “Beer Street” and “Gin Lane”, and “The Four Stages of Cruelty” were armed at the men who had authority for the poor, but the plates undoubtedly reached the poor themselves, who saw them in shop windows, in coffee houses, etc.

Up to this point Hogarth was a designer and print-maker of unsurpassed intellectu­al subtlety, whose work can be appreciated only in the company of Swift, Pope* and Fielding

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* Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745) — an Irish satirical writer and cleric, who wrote Gulliver's Travels as well as many shorter works, attacking corruption in religion and education;

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) — a British satirical poet who wrote the Rape of the Lock, which describes the foolishness of the fashionable people.

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He had carried this “readable” structure of meaning as far as “Marriage a la Mode”. He now radically reduced the complexity and replaced the readable with the expressiveness. One of his best works of this period was the portrait of Garrick* as Richard III.

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* Garrick, David (1717-1779) — English actor, producer and dramatist, who introduced a revolutionary new style of natu­ral, interpretative acting and initiated other reforms in staging.

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In 1753, Hogarth published his famous book “The Analysis of Beauty”. The book, which was basically antiacademic, was greeted with attacks in verse and caricature. Hogarth was deeply shocked and offended.

In early 1754, Hogarth began to advertise his last ambitious series, four paintings of an election. The engravings were not all published until 1758.

In the 1750s, Hogarth returned in a limit­ed way to portrait painting (“Hogarth’s Servants”, 1750-1755, “David Garrick and his Wife”, 1757).

The last four years of Hogarth’s life were the years of illness. He died in 1764. He was buried in Chiswick churchyard. A great painter who revolutionized the art of paint­ing, Hogarth is chiefly remembered as cre­ator of satirical narrative pictures, who in­fluenced not only painters but such writers as Dickens and Thackeray* as well.

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* Dickens, Charles (1812-1870) — an English novelist, consid­ered by many to be the greatest one of all.

Thackeray, Wil­liam Makepeace (1811-1863) — an English writer born in India whose books include Vanity Fair.